Business

CH2M Hill sees opportunity in post-Fukushima nuke decommissioning

The Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant's No. 4 reactor, damaged in a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, is considered the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl in 1986. (EPA file)

CH2M Hill chief executive Jacqueline Hinman

TOKYO — Decommissioning Japan's nuclear plants is a business opportunity for CH2M Hill, which is overseeing cleanup at the Hanford atomic weapons site in the U.S., a vice president of the Douglas County-based engineering company said.

Japan will probably retire its reactors of similar age and design to those at the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station within the next decade, said Robert Kury, CH2M Hill's vice president for nuclear liabilities decommissioning and dismantling program management. That will provide an opening for the company, which has managed nuclear decontamination projects for the U.S. and U.K. governments.

"The big market is the decommissioning," he said. "It may not be in the next five years, but it will be in the next 10 years."

The 30,000-employee company doesn't expect immediate work at the Fukushima site, since the project-management role it usually plays is being done by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power, Kury said last month. He was in Tokyo to attend a forum on business opportunities at the damaged plant.

Hanford lessons

Hanford stretches over 586 square miles of scrubland southeast of Seattle, where thousands of technicians are decommissioning nine reactors in operation from 1944 to 1987. Its laboratories and plutonium facilities were integral to the Manhattan Project to make the first atomic bomb.

CH2M Hill has hosted Japanese delegations connected to the Fukushima cleanup at the Hanford Engineer Works weapons lab in Washington state, where the U.S. Energy Department has spent more than $16 billion since 1989 on decommissioning.

Advertisement

Cleaning up the Fukushima site could take four decades and cost as much as $108 billion.

An earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 caused the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima plant, the worst civilian atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. About 160,000 people were forced to evacuate because of radiation fallout.

Four of Japan's 48 operable nuclear reactors are Mark I- model boiling water reactors, the same design as the three melted Fukushima units.

The four are the No. 1 reactor at Tohoku Electric's Onagawa plant; the No. 1 reactor at Hokuriku Electric Power's Shika plant; and reactor Nos. 1 and 2 at Chugoku Electric Power's Shimane plant. Those utilities will likely retire the reactors because it would be prohibitively expensive to upgrade them to meet tougher regulations set in June, Kury said.

Treaty obstacle

One obstacle for CH2M Hill and other foreign companies is liability for damage or injury if they are involved in an accident at a nuclear plant in Japan.

Kury said he is optimistic Japan this year will join an international treaty that assigns accident liability to plant operators rather than equipment and technology vendors such as CH2M Hill.

"Small companies will take that risk because you can't get blood out of a turnip," he said. "We're a multibillion dollar company."

Such companies with specialized technology and equipment may find work at the Fukushima plant as subcontractors to Toshiba, Hitachi and Obayashi, Kury said.

CH2M Hill may consider acquiring companies that make equipment or technology that would be of use at the Fukushima plant, he said.

"We don't make widgets, we don't make machines, we don't make detectors," Kury said. "So we'll go back and think. We're a big company, we can go and buy a valve company, we could go buy this, we could go buy that, so it really helps me convince my senior management of a future strategic plan."

Rockies relief pitcher John Axford, who hasn't pitched for the team since last Wednesday, was forced to leave spring training camp after his 2-year-old son was bit by a rattlesnake twice in his right foot.

One-day event to run slide down University HillIt's not quite the alternative mode of transportation that Boulder's used to, but, for one day this summer, residents will be able to traverse several city blocks atop inflatable tubes.

DETROIT (AP) — In a story March 27 about a 'Little Syria' exhibit going to Ellis Island, The Associated Press, due to incorrect information from the Arab American National Museum, erroneously reported the date the exhibit will open. Full Story